I’m sick right now and I’ve been coughing up a lot of large green chunks. Is my body creating it to fight off whatever’s happening, or is the cold causing the phlem? I’d love to know!
Google didn’t help me very much when I asked, it kind of just told me that I either had the flu, bronchitis, or cancer. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
In: 97
that greenish gunk is whats left of your organisms “health police”, the white blood cells, after they have dealt with those microbes which cause the illness in first place. its a mixture of dead cells and sekret.
After days of hard fighting between your immune system and the invaders, the battlefield is littered with dead soldier cells and other trash, munitions, etc, your body cleans that up and puts it into your phlegm, like taking out the trash. These waste products from the fighting is what makes the phlegm green.
So next time you cough up green phlegm, have some damn respect and give a minute of silence for those fallen troops.
Seriously though, green phlegm means your immune system is kicking ass.
Normally you make saliva/mucous in your nose/mouth/throat/lungs which is mostly water and fairly clear. When you add a bunch of protein/cells/cell debris to it, it can turn colors like green/yellow. So when you’re sick, whatever germ made you sick is attacking the cells lining your nose/throat/lungs is causing damage. In response, your immune system attacks back by killing the germs, killing cells infected by the germs, pushing any damaged stuff off of the cell lining, and even having some white blood cells jump out into the mucus to try to kill anything floating around in it.
It’s your immune system’s response to the germs that give you the symptoms you feel. Increased mucous production (now filled with remnants of battle, and thus different colors) and subsequent coughing to get it up and out of you.
When you have a cold, white blood cells called neutrophils are sent to fight the infection. One of the bug-killing enzymes they produce is called myeloperoxidase, which has a heme (iron-containing) pigment that causes the green colour in secretions such as pus and nasal mucus.
(I copied this description off some website because I forgot the relevant enzyme and had to google. Can confirm it is correct though.)
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